“Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.”

Clearly Wordle is useful Web 2.0 tool that could be used to support literacy.

Example 1

Learners can paste in an extract from a book, Wordle would identify the prominence of words within the extract. Learners could then use these words to formulate there own work.

Example 2

Wordle could be particularly useful in supporting learners in the writing of poetry. Learners paste in an extract of text from a web page, they could then write a poem based on the most popular words identified by Wordle.

It almost creates a free form poem in itself!

http://wordle.net/